Deploying and configuring a Mesos cluster using Ansible

Ansible is one of the popular infrastructure automation tools commonly used by system administrators today and recently acquired by Red Hat. Nodes are managed through Secure Shell (SSH) and require only Python support. Ansible has open sourced a lot of playbooks, including an ansible-mesos one that we will discuss in this section.

The ansible-mesos playbook can be used to install and configure a Mesos cluster with customized master as well as slave setup options. Currently, it supports Ubuntu and CentOS/Red Hat operating system-powered machines. The ansible-mesos playbook also supports setting specific slave executors and hence can be run with native Docker support.

Installing Ansible

Ansible installation is only required on a single machine. It does not require a database, nor does it need to keep a daemon running all the time. It uses SSH to manage the cluster and requires Python (versions 2.6 or 2.7) to be installed on the machine...